Launched in early 2015, Visit.org is a technology platform for curated travel experiences offered by nonprofits around the globe. It enables travelers to add half to multi-day immersive experiences to their itinerary, with all revenues channeled back to the local community through the host organizations. Jeremy Smith spoke with its founder, Michal Alter about their mission to be “the world’s leading platform for social impact travel experiences”.
Travindy: What inspired you to set up Visit.org?
Michal: Throughout my extensive travels in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, my most memorable moments were when I interacted with local communities and learned about their cultural customs. In Israel, after I finished my service in the air force, I worked as a software engineer in the high tech industry. During this time I started volunteering with refugees from east Africa at a local nonprofit in Tel Aviv. Eventually, I became the director of refugee affairs. I transitioned my career to the nonprofit sector in hopes of making more impact with my technology background and business expertise. I met many incredible people who shared their unique stories with me. These moments were very transformative and I realized that I wanted to be able to create awareness for people who have the knowledge of local culture, history, and personal stories to share.
Travindy: What would you say sets you apart from other similar organisations?
Michal: Visit.org launched in 2015. Our innovation lies in the fact that all of our experiences are short, affordable, and can be easily added to any travel itinerary. Visit.org reverses the traditional model of voluntourism; instead of the visitor providing a service to the local community, the local community provides a service to the visitor. We hoped to be different by creating the debut marketplace for social impact travel experiences hosted by social ventures (nonprofits and other community-based enterprises) around the world. The $7T travel industry leaves only 5% of earnings in local hands. Through Visit.org 100% of hosts’ revenue is invested back into the local community. Visit.org enables social ventures to create and market mainstream tourism products.
Travindy: How do you ensure that the social ventures you send travellers to offer the sort of rich, story-led transformative experiences that travellers seek?
Michal: We ensure that the social ventures that partner with Visit.org offer rich, story-led transformative experiences through our rigorous vetting process that is enforced through strict online research and our feet-on-the-ground approach. We confident that the experience will be immersive and impactful as we send one of our 200 Visit.org Ambassadors all over the world for pilot visits. Our Ambassadors experience the orgs activity exactly as it would be for a customer. Afterward, they submit a detailed quality report in which they provide their unbiased feedback by answering a set of informative questions as well as submitting images and videos. The Ambassadors usually write about their Visit.org experiences on their personal blog and social media channels. Since we do not have control over their content we can be sure that it is an honest appraisal of the visit and their personal experience. In addition, we collect reviews from visitors which are shared on each activity page.
For example, here is feedback from our Ambassadors Paula Vlamings and John Denning after they visited the Mapuche Discovery Tour: Community Art and Traditional Culture in Chile January 2017:
“Our visit with Fundacion Chol-Chol was a wonderful experience to understand the Mapuche culture and traditions. We had lengthy conversations with Zenobia and Juan Manuel, who shared stories of their families, some of whom were spiritual leaders in the community. Their stories showed us some insight into their history. We saw how important the land is to their culture and heard of their struggles to protect it. Through our weaving demonstration, we learned how difficult and involved the weaving process is. It made us truly appreciate the skill and love involved in making the beautiful textiles. We bought two beautiful rugs that we are thrilled to have back in our home. It was a really enjoyable afternoon and we highly recommend it.”
Travindy: how do you ensure the social impact of the many orgs you work with and support? Are you able to measure the difference tourism is making to them as well as the difference they make as an organisation in general?
Michal: We ensure the social impact of our partners by focusing on collaborating with locally operated grassroots organizations. All of our providers are non-profits and other types of social enterprises. They are legally obligated to invest revenue into programs that benefit the local community and their specific missions. These groups are the best equipped to serve their communities as they have an intimate understanding of the issues they are working to resolve.
We conduct extensive online research about potential partners to ensure the track record of the do-good organization’s positive impact on the local community that it serves. Our 200+ Ambassadors visit partners to ensure ongoing vetting. The Ambassadors submit detailed quality reports to share their earnest observations from their experience.
We periodically survey our partner organizations to collect insight regarding how the revenue is being spent. If we have any concerns about how the funds are spent by a partner organization we send an Ambassador to report from the ground. We also conduct more in-depth case studies about partner organizations so we can learn best practices and share them with our network of providers around the world. One recent moving case study revealed that due to her experience leading groups of travelers for the first time, a local woman in Jerusalem gained the confidence to pursue her dream of becoming a teacher and went on to pursue a college degree despite coming from a background that did not encourage her to participate in the workforce.
Travindy: Do you partner with hotels and other tourism companies, so they can offer your tours to guests for example?
Michal: We bring our highly vetted supply market to online travel agencies such as Expedia and Tripadvisor via Viator. Part of our mission is to ensure that customers can find and book these unique experiences that Visit.org’s partners offer. We encourage and invite any player in the travel industry, including hotels, travel agents, and other tourism operators, to work with us and distribute these unique, transformational experiences to their clients.
Travindy: What developments can we expect from Visit.org in the near future? Any exciting plans you can share?
Michal: Visit.org will be focusing on creating social impact experiences in cities where many travelers are already visiting. Doing so will combat over-tourism by creating mindful travel opportunities in top destinations. Therefore, travelers can make the decision to use their tourism dollars for good by booking immersive and impactful experiences in the cities they visit such as New York City, Amsterdam, Cape Town, Paris, London, and more. In addition, many of our partner grassroots charities work on the outskirts of these major cities in areas that do not typically benefit as much from the tourism industry. So bringing in new channels of revenue through tourism will help support local communities in less popular areas as well.
